Music as Organized Sound – Derbyshire
Without getting too much into the details of materiality of music, the video below exemplifies how a composer works with the materiality of music in music production. The composer, Delia Derbyshire is using any sounds, processing them, and making a composition out of those sound organizations and in this video. Delia Derbyshire explains what kind of musical materials she used to compose [arrange] the theme [title music] of Doctor Who.
In the video above, Derbyshire (1965) reveals how she worked with any sounds in her compositions:
The first stage in the realization of a piece of music is to construct the individual sounds that we're going to use. To do this, we can, if we like, go to these sound generators here electronic generators, and we'll listen to three of the basic electronic sounds. First it's a simpler sound, which is a sine wave. Particularly on the oscilloscope, it has a very simple form and has a very pure sound. Now listen to the same note, but with a different quality. This is a square wave. Because it's very square on the picture and it's perhaps rather harsh to listen to, this is because it has a lot of high harmonics and that's what gives the corners on the picture. A more complex sound still is white noise. But those basic sounds aren't really interesting in their raw state like this to make them a value for a musical piece, we have to shape them and mold them. But using all of these, we can build up any sound we can possibly imagine. Almost we spend quite a lot of time trying to invent new sounds. I mean, sounds that don't exist already sounds that can't be produced by musical instruments. But we don't always go to electronic sound generators for our basic sources of sound. If the sound we want exists already in real life, say we can't go and record it. The sound I want for the rhythm of this piece needs to be a very short, dry, hollow wooden sun. I can get from this. And then the sound for the punctuating chords. I want the sound of a short wire strike string being plucked. That's at the speed we recorded in the studio. We can get the lower sounds we need from the rhythm. By slowing down a tape. And the higher sounds by speeding up the tape. These particular pictures we can record on this machine here. And then all we have to do is cut the notes to the right length. We can join them together on a loop and listen to them.
In that video, Delia Derbyshire showed us how she was selecting different kinds of audio, and how they relate to each other. For example, how does a sinusoidal sound? How does a square wave sound? After selecting the musical material, we observed how Delia Derbyshire is composing by organizing the selected material in time. Like many other composers, Delia Derbyshire (1965) organized musical material consisted of any sound, to compose [arrange] the Doctor Who theme [title music] using that material:
And then all we have to do is cut the notes to the right length. We can join them together on a loop and. Listen to them. And then with the higher notes of the rhythm, again, we do need to get down a loop and play it in synchronization with the first date. And over this we can play the sound of the plucked string, which can be either in the form of the. Loop like this. Civilization, or in the form of a band on the tape.
This documentary from BBC is a great example to see how a composer works with latent audio spaces and temporal organization of sound (figure 1). The latent audio spaces are rooted in our understanding, perception, comprehension and conceptualization of audio similarity and audio dissimilarity. It also showcased how we organize sounds in time, so that we come up with musical form. Whether it is a performance or composition, We can map both of those musical organizations to machine learning approaches. For example, to organize sounds in an abstract space of similarity and dissimilarity, we can use the notion of latent space in machine learning and use various machine learning approaches to create those latent spaces. On the other hand, to organize sounds in time, we can use a variety of sequence modeling approaches or machine learning approaches for time series data.